Finally, my iPhone will start making me some money! How? Gigwalk. It’s a relatively new app that I learned about from an article in the Los Angeles Times, so it’s been around a bit and earned some high-profile, credibility-establishing attention. That’s important for something promising to make you money. How does it work? You download the app, sign up through Facebook or create your own login, then start looking for gigs. I live in Philadelphia in Center City, and there are hundreds of available gigs. What are the gigs? They can vary, but it seems the vast majority involve visiting a business and taking pictures and answering some questions about the place. The gigs pay from $3 to $90, but most of the ones I clicked on were in the $5 to $7 range. However, as you gain experience and prove to be reliable, more lucrative gigs await. Maybe! Here’s what a user had to say to the Times: More

There’s been a lot of confusion on Google+ about when businesses will be allowed to have pages, and why certain companies and news outlets were allowed to violate the initial prohibition. There was a lot of bellyaching (see above) the other day and then heads started to roll. On Thursday, Google purged the unauthorized accounts of companies such as CBS News, NBC News, the Seattle Times, and Mashable News, which now is founder Pete Cashmore’s page. (see above.) No need to despair, capitalists! In “the next few months” Google will roll out “business profiles.” Until then, as TheNextWeb reported:

It seems however that Google is encouraging businesses, for the time being, to pick a real person from its organization as a mouthpiece who can share links on the network.

On Thursday, a man in a Ewing Township, New Jersey, shot and killed another man reportedly over a parking space. Wayne Voorhees fired multiple shots from his second-floor unit at the Versailles Apartments in a nearly eight-hour stand-off with police. Stephanie Savas was in an apartment alone in a neighboring building inside the complex and, she said, unaware that others had been evacuated. She shared her situation with friends on Facebook. Then she decided to write about her situation on Reddit, the popular online community, and the post took off, garnering hundreds of replies, and sparking a controversy about whether she was faking it. A moderator in the forum flagged the post as a suspected fake. The red flag was lifted, but the post has yet to be confirmed as true. I decided to investigate. More

In my last post, I said Google+ is what you make of it. So far, I’ve created an expanded Twitter. The people I know at some level and the people I follow are drawn almost exclusively from Twitter. A few are also friends on Facebook. My universe of Facebook friends is a hodgepodge collection of real-life friends and co-workers, old classmates, people I friended to interview for stories, people I met on MySpace who switched to Facebook (use your imagination), people I met from other online groups (such as Wonkette commenters), etc. My Google+ crowd is on Twitter, is tech-savvy, and smart. The quality of posting and commenting is very high. These folks also talk a lot about Google+, which I don’t mind, though some are feeling free to post animated cat GIFS and otherwise diversify their voice. I called My Version of Google+ an expanded Twitter because the people I know on Twitter are now being revealed to me beyond the 140-character limit. Especially for people I’m following, such as high-profile entrepreneurs and tech journalists, I am getting access to their thinking that was only available if they had some other outlet and linked to it on Twitter. With all that said, this means that these people are spending less time on Twitter. So my version of Google+ plus is cannibalizing Twitter. Every minute I spend on Google+ is a minute I would have spent scrolling through my fast-paced Twitter stream. I love Twitter and don’t want to hurt it. Xeni Jardin, an editor at Boing Boing, wasn’t so sentimental when she declared: “It’s official. I like G+ more than Twitter now.”More

I finally got access to Google+. After Facebook announced and launched Skype videochat, Google unlocked Google+ overnight, to presumably steal a little bit of the spotlight back. Once I got in, my first major task was to contend with Circles, the feature that groups people by categories. Who goes where? I decided to get rid of the “acquaintances” circle and start off with friends, family, and people I follow. I uploaded a few photos just so people can have something to see and that was about it. I’ve ordered a headset so I can use the group videochat function called Hangouts, which means I haven’t tried it yet. People seem to like it. Anyway, I did a lot of reading and one idea stood out: Google+ is where you can restart your social network. More

I’m already angry at Google+ and I haven’t even tried it yet. I’ve had people send me invites, but Google+ hasn’t been activated for me. I keep getting the message: “We’ve temporarily exceeded our capacity.” It’s not like everyone has it and I don’t. Only a small fraction of Google accounts have it as part of a “limited field trial.” So I’ll get in, eventually. Oh yeah, I forgot to explain what it is: More